Investigating Memory Problems

After you have observed memory usage under normal conditions and established your memory baseline, you might notice that the memory counters sometimes stray from the typical range. The following sections describe how to investigate conditions that cause memory values to deviate from the baseline.

The following activities help you to learn about and analyze memory usage and memory bottlenecks using System Monitor counters and other tools.

Investigating memory shortages

Investigating disk paging

Investigating user-mode memory leaks

Investigating kernel-mode memory leaks

Monitoring the cache

Resolving memory and cache bottlenecks

Table 6.2 summarizes the most important counters to monitor for analyzing memory usage.

Table6.2 Counters for Analyzing Memory Usage

To monitor for

Use this Object \ Counter

Memory shortages

Memory\Available Bytes or Available KBytes (to see the amount in kilobytes) or Available MBytes (to see the amount in megabytes)
Process (
All_processes
)\Working Set
Memory\Pages/sec
Memory\Cache Bytes

The LogicalDisk object counters are not available by default. If you want to monitor the values for these counters, you must first activate the counters by typing
diskperf
–
yv
at the Windows command prompt.